 Thanks. Thanks Daniel. So I'm I'm Harrison kill in the Texas commissioner of higher education and I appreciate this opportunity to speak with you all about the challenges we're facing some of our immediate responses in Texas. And also to share a few suggestions for how I think we might want to approach digital learning so we can bolster the historic transformation in higher education. It's already underway. So of course, 2020 has been quite a year. I'm only about a year into my new position, although it seems a lot longer than that right now. And in addition to the kinds of major issues we routinely have to deal with. We've also in Texas felt the combined pain of the COVID-19 pandemic and a crisis in our global energy markets in the shocks to our state and national economies have been profound. So we've had nearly 3.8 million Texans apply for unemployment since March in September. Our unemployment rate was about 8.3%. And that was down from a high of about 13% in May and still more than double what it was at the beginning of the year. Our sales tax collections which are the major source of revenue for our state budget. Were also down by more than 6% in September, but they had been down by more than 13% in May and that was the steepest year over year decline we'd seen in Texas in more than a decade. So the current recession is also the most inequitable that we've seen since unemployment data was tracked. So women. Black Texans Hispanic Texans low income Texans and our Texans who live in rural communities have disproportionately lost jobs and are seeing slower returns to employment. So what we're seeing in all this data isn't like anything that any of us or most of our parents ever experienced because in a period of about eight months. We went from having one of the most robust economies and state history to having millions of people out of work. And we know that many of those same jobs may not come back. Meanwhile, the uncertainty and the fear that's created by COVID-19 continues to disrupt our daily lives and our livelihoods. Most students and their families, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating. So even before the pandemic, our institutions weren't able to meet all students financial aid with grants and scholarships. A few months ago, about 70% of our college students were working, and yet we still had many students who struggled with food and housing insecurity. This academic year, there are far fewer of the kinds of jobs that students typically rely on and students have had more trouble paying new bills. We also continue to have significant challenges in college and career advising, not only because of low counselor student ratios in secondary schools, but also because students connection to the resources that were offered in conjunction with college entrance exams has been disrupted. For our adults, one of our recent polls found that fewer than one in three adults without degrees said that they understand the available pathways and marketable skills and details about available educational programs very well. All these factors are contributing to a current situation where low income students, black and Hispanic students and students from rural communities are less likely to enroll in higher education and more likely to stop out or delay graduation. And our enrollments, and surprisingly, are down at the broad access institutions that most students attend. Now for our colleges and universities, the COVID-19 pandemic has entailed massive costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, not only with the new costs of converting to online learning and moving students off campus and setting up new COVID-19 mitigation strategies and testing centers, but also with the simultaneous collapse of multiple revenue streams they depended on from housing, from food service, events, athletics, and philanthropy. This has been the most significant disruption to the operations of our colleges and universities since the end of the Second World War. And I want to commend you all and all of the leadership of our colleges, our universities, our university systems for their swift and creative responses that have prioritized the safety of our students, our faculty, and our staff. So I know many institutional leaders and faculty across the state, I know they've been working tirelessly to support their students continued academic progress and success. Of course, that included converting nearly all their courses to online delivery, standing up a merchant's aid, and buying thousands of laptops and hotspots. It's kind of flowing below the radar screen that the institutions have also been active partners in communities' public health responses, not only through hospitals and clinics, but also by donating personal protective equipment, re-engineering respirators, sanitizing masks, bringing face shields and contributing in other ways. Now the pandemic's not yet behind us, and we remain in a state of uncertainty about the rest of the school year and so many other aspects of our lives. But even as we take necessary measures to limit the spread of COVID-19, we have to look to the future and chart a course to recovery, and that recovery starts with higher education. So we know this because we've seen aspects of it before and not that long ago. So in the Great Recession, the U.S. lost more than 7 million jobs, including 5.6 million that had required only a high school diploma. Now by 2016, our U.S. economy had added more than 11.4 million net new jobs, but only about 80,000 jobs that required just high school diploma had come back. So put another way, American workers with only a high school education had experienced almost no recovery at all. And now we're facing even greater challenges, and people without post-secondary credentials are especially vulnerable. Right now, the unemployment rates for American workers who don't have post-secondary credentials are more than twice the rates for workers who have bachelor's degrees. So these disruptions we're experiencing are accelerating changes that were already underway in our economy. And that means that Americans who participate in our economic recovery who are going to fill the jobs of tomorrow's emerging economy are increasingly going to need new skills and high-value credentials. Now at the Texas Higher Ed Coordinating Board, our primary roles through the crisis have been to act as a resource, a partner, and an advocate for Texas higher education. So in particular, we've been partnering closely with our governor with legislative leadership and other state agencies so we can provide regulatory flexibility to help our public institutions adapt to COVID-19 and continue to serve students. We've been partnering with state and national philanthropies to raise private funds for emergency student aid, and we continue to support our higher education institutions to help them ensure continuity of campus operations and instruction for students. The most significant recent actions that we've been able to take have come about because of a commitment by our governor, Governor Greg Abbott, and our legislative leadership of $175 million of federal CARES Act stimulus funds, particularly the component that's known as the governor's emergency education relief funds or gear for strategic investments in higher education initiatives that are specifically tied to economic recovery. The majority of these funds, about $150 million were allocated for student financial aid that included $57 million allocated to protect our major student financial aid programs from coronavirus-related state budget cuts, $46.5 million for additional emergency aid for students who were suddenly at risk of foregoing higher education because their families financial situations had suddenly changed, and then another $46.5 million dedicated to support displaced workers who need to reskill or upskill to get back into the workforce and the nearly 3.9 million Texans who at some point had stopped out or dropped out of college. Many of those students aren't striking distance of finishing, so we're going to support our institutions in re-enrolling these students so they can reskill or upskill, get onto a new career path, and contribute to our Texas recovery. The remaining gear funds that our Texas state leadership committed for higher education, about $25 million, was allocated to our agency to modernize our educational and workforce data infrastructure and to bolster the quality of online learning, including through the development and adoption of open educational resources. So as we look beyond our immediate responses to economic recovery, these kinds of strategic investments in higher education are going to be essential for our students, for our institutions, for our states. This time of disruption is also a unique window of opportunity when it's increasingly urgent to design and implement new models of higher education that reflect a renewed commitment to our responsibilities to promote access, foster social capital, increase student success, and drive upward mobility at scale. Now, if we were having this conversation a year ago and I'd announced that all of our colleges and universities were going to be able to transition all their courses online within a couple of weeks, I would have sounded pretty crazy, but of course that's exactly what had happened. Remember that so there were these old criticisms about colleges and universities being resistant to technology and slow to change and a lot of that got blown out of the water in about two weeks last March and this was amazing. Now, especially with you all let's stipulate that neither the technologies nor the course result redesigns have always worked as they were intended, especially in the first versions that were rolled out. But still what I've consistently heard across our state and across the nation is that as the creative energies of our students, faculty, departments, whole institutions were suddenly thrust into working on digital learning, a panoply of new ideas and experiments have emerged. So higher ed has been implementing major changes to courses, programs, academic calendars, how they use physical spaces and how they use technologies far faster and far beyond anything we anticipated a year ago. I've been arguing that this is a critical moment when we need to get behind our innovators and higher education share what we're learning about more effective designs for learning and advocate for new resources policies and partnerships that are going to allow these educational innovations to flourish and scale. So that's why I was grateful to our state leadership for committing a portion of our gear funds to strengthen the quality of digital learning and reduce the cost of instructional materials to students. Right now, faculty teams at our public and independent institutions across Texas are working on applications for grants through our agency to build out and scale work, they've already begun with open educational resources across three major strands of work. The core courses that most students take and frequently transfer among institutions, college readiness materials and workforce education materials. And I want to say we deeply appreciate our partnerships with open stacks with UT Austin's Charles Adana Center and also with Dallas Dallas College as thought partners in this work and as technical assistance providers for our faculty and institutions across the state. But the challenges we face today are much deeper than a lack of resources for the kinds of things that we've already been doing. We're in the early stages of the historic transformation in higher education and of course many of you all are right on the front lines. The way forward is going to require bold leadership, strategic investment, stronger partnerships and true grit so we can emerge with renewed commitments to our public missions and a better future. Over the last several months, I've spent a lot of time in long conversations and late night communications and texting with college and university and system leaders and board members and legislators. And despite the scale of the challenges we're still facing, I think we all recognize that higher ed has got to be an essential part of the solution for how we're going to adapt, overcome and emerge even stronger as a state and as a nation. And this work is already underway, but it's going to have to accelerate over the next several months and into the coming years. I know that our community and technical colleges are already gearing up to expand access so people can achieve high value post-secondary credentials more than we've ever served before. Our institutions continue to work at the frontiers of knowledge, leading discoveries and insights that are going to power a brighter and more competitive future. And all of our institutions are rapidly expanding their capacity to leverage digital learning and find innovative ways to deliver higher education. So in this unique time, when students and faculty and campuses are suddenly dependent on digital learning, what should our approaches include so we can effectively cut across and dampen the current challenges we face and advance our broader public mission at scale. I'd like to nominate three components. So first instructional technologies, second facilitated networks, and third data infrastructure. So of course, instructional technologies are becoming more sophisticated, more ubiquitous and let's stipulate that these technologies have often been designed and deployed to support current practices, which means that they can reinforce our traditional and more formal conceptions teaching in classrooms and learning. But there's a subset of these technologies that are being designed and deployed in ways that transcend those traditional structures. So not only on demand, but adaptive technologies, learning applications and advising tools that are powered by AI, integrated learning analytics, more intentional focus on intersections among instructional design and UI UX design. And of course, next generation open educational resources that can better support instructional design in deeper learning. So I'd emphasize a couple of points about these technologies. So first, I think that the design of instructional technologies in general needs to be brought into closer dialogue with the learning sciences, especially intersections among cognitive science neuroscience instructional design. I'm especially excited about the work that price is undertaken to promote more effective use of the open stacks resources and better course design. And I'm also excited about new platforms that are being built to facilitate learning in ways that are collaborative, social, and to promote learner engagement. I say also as a dad to two teenagers, I suggest that maybe down the road, we might want to consider whether there's elements of the kind of coordination and collaboration and learning happening in the context of gaming that might be transformed and transposed more effectively into the context because that was how it comes a great relief to many of us. So, second point I'd like to emphasize is that our students and faculty have to be supported in the use of these technologies and to be candid. I'm concerned about the current state of many of our campus teaching centers and our digital learning support groups for facilitating this work within and across our campuses so over the last few years. Some of our provosts and presidents has started to look at these as cost centers and had pulled back their support. And then all of a sudden this last March those same centers went from supporting a few dozen online courses to several thousand online courses, and many of those centers are still scrambling. The second major component I'd recommend is technology enabled facilitated networks, especially to foster and support well trained empowered educators so to illustrate the kind of networks. I have in mind, let me talk a little bit about the on ramps initiative that Daniel mentioned. So that's a dual enrollment program I'd founded when I was at UT Austin and on ramps was designed around facilitated networks of university faculty and high school teachers so the program works like this so your faculty teams at the university lead development of low cost prototype college courses in corresponding high school courses and training materials, working with teams of instructional designers and technologists. And some of that lower cost is achieved by using best in class open educational resources. Then high school teachers affiliate with the university, and they're trained, along with the faculty and technology pedagogy and content so they can teach corresponding high school courses and join networks of other teachers who are connected to and supported by the university based hub, and then high school students simultaneously take faculty led distance education college courses from the university faculty and corresponding high school courses. The high school teachers receive ongoing coaching and support from peers from university faculty and staff and contribute to ongoing improvements as co authors they can even assign the students to create new content. And then finally the course design the content the training materials are refined and scaled and improved based on data and input from across the network so of course finally there is tongue in cheek because the process is never really final. So, in terms of student success and educator engagement, what we've seen is that on ramps courses get far better traction than in our UT mooks and in more conventional dual credit courses so why is that because all of these leverage cutting edge technologies, all of them leverage strong instructional design, but it turns out that the key wasn't really in the technology, or even in the instructional design it was a combination of high touch coaching and support systems that were enabled by a technology stack, which we designed to support respectful engagement among the educators through facilitated networks versus more passive broadcast models or disempowering direct instruction models. Now in Texas, we're increasingly bringing these approaches and insights into other domains in particular at the coordinating board we're standing up major initiatives to strengthen advising from middle school through high school through post secondary education to adult learners. And then we're also standing up another initiative in partnership with institutions teaching support centers to establish a digital learning clearinghouse of assets that can be shared across institutions. We're very excited about the potential of these kinds of efforts to leverage the technology and build our educators pedagogical social capital at scale. Looking further down the road. Also, I do think it's going to be important for us to train and support and promote educators in a way that will enable them to further enlist their students as co authors and co development co developers not only in discrete assignments, but also in the design of their educational pathways we see glimmers of this already but it's mostly happening on the margins. And then the third major component I think it's critical for an efforts and digital learning is going to be educational workforce data. So it's increasingly possible for us to link and analyze and map this detailed data about our students pathways through k 12 and the higher ed into the workforce and bring that data into dialogue with other data like the detailed course level data of the LMS or unstructured data from syllabi and other data about career paths and the skills employers are looking for so we can eliminate what's happening with students within and across institutions and enable us to focus our attention and resources. So right now at the coordinating board we're leading an effort for the governor and in partnership with the workforce commission Texas Education Agency to to stand up a new data infrastructure with modern data modeling visualization analytics. So we can help create new opportunities to drive improvement reduce costs and increase value. These. So these three major components of digital digital learning infrastructure that I'm talking about so the instructional technologies the facilitated networks the data infrastructure. I think are all essential to enable higher education to advance equity at scale far beyond the traditional boundaries of our physical campuses and our institutions traditional conceptions of who they serve versus more familiar notions of who they are. So one especially important way we do this is we can create dynamic platforms for rapid testing research and evaluation improvement across institutions with the ability to operate at far greater speed and scale than was ever possible before. So finally let me just say a couple of things about policy because in addition to providing funding policy provides essential enabling conditions for higher education to be able to be effective and driving student success and upward mobility. So the basic principles is straightforward for new designs and digital learning and higher education to be stable and resilient they're going to have to be designed and built with careful consideration of the context in which we're building. So in particular, I'd argue that this moment requires higher education policy context that effectively are going to create access, encourage cross institutional collaboration, encourage innovation support improvement and facilitate upward mobility. So as as we consider options I think we can take a lot of inspiration but also caution from K 12 policies, but I'd recommend that we, we need to encourage not just our institutional leaders but our policymakers to have serious conversations about the kind of capital investment that's going to be required for this transformation to take hold. Student financing options, regulatory room for us to innovate the policy guardrails that are going to prioritize the return on investment for students and public data publicity about key indicators that as Sharon mentioned in the transparency of data for deeper dives. We're still in the early stages on identifying scaling and improving effective practices so we've started multiple aspects of this work in our state but we're still in the early stages there's a lot of hard work ahead, and we look forward to partnering with institutions university systems and other partners across Texas and beyond, so we can accelerate and increase the impact of this work in closing I just want to say again how much I appreciate this discussion today, and the work you all are doing. We're on the front lines of this work on behalf of your students your institutions, your states, and our nation. So we continue to face unprecedented challenges, and our students and institutions have suffered severe financial shocks but I think all of us in higher education recognized that this isn't a time to try to backfill lost revenue and hunker down. See what grants we can get hope things get back to normal. So now our priority has to be laying foundations and building new kinds of free economic recovery and a better, more just future so committed educators, like, like you all whose ideas and energy will accelerate our path through these incredibly challenging times are essential partners in this work and I think we need to hear new voices, including communities and institutions, employers students whose perspectives haven't always been heard. Thank you again for the voice the work you do. And thank you for including me in the program today I'm looking forward to our conversations.